A 21st Century Guide to Weird Milks

When I was a kid, I used to drink a gallon of milk a day. I drank it with every meal. I drank it with snacks. At the school cafeteria, I would head over to the stainless steel milk dispenser and load up four of those little rinky-dink glasses they give you at a time. I drank so much milk that my mom began imposing limits. "I just bought two gallons at the store and I’m not going back to the fucking store again until Tuesday. So if you drink all the milk, tough shit." That’s how I remember her putting it.

Anyway, I no longer drink milk recreationally for a couple of reasons. One: regular milk has sugar in it, and sugar is bad for you. Two: I am finished growing. Gone are the days when I could quaff a gallon of skim and pretend it would help me grow five more inches. My milk days are over. It’s no longer a required staple of my diet.

And that’s a good thing because milk is fucking confusing as hell now. Milk is no longer simply milk. Do you drink COW milk? You fucking heathen. There are now any number of dairy-free nut and grain milks out there for you to choose from. The selection is comically overwhelming, so much so that the powers at GQ asked me to head over to the local Whole Foods, buy every last kind of not-milk (NILK) that I could, and rate those milks for you, the growing boy who read our fair magazine every month. Here now are my findings.

THE DRECK

Almond Milk

Package Copy: "We soak raw PPO-free almonds until they sprout and then slowly cold press them to extract a fresh, creamy almondmilk alive with complex flavors are natural nutrients."

Color: Eggshell

Taste: Horrific. Of all the strange milks in this study, almond milk is the only one that my wife has purchased in the past for consumption in our home. I don’t remember almond milk tasting this horrible when she bought it. Maybe it’s a brand thing. You might find that Silk or Almond Breeze makes a more agreeable faux dairy product than the $9 bottle of watery garbage that I purchased. I don’t want my milk to be "sprouted." Sounds pubescent.

All I know is that this was arguably the worst milk of the bunch. You had to shake it to get it to even resemble milk. That’s the thing about nut milks. They aren’t REAL milk, obviously. They are suspensions: a mix of water and soaked nut meat that resembles milk only if you run it through a tumbler cycle in your dryer first.

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Also, this milk was grainy. Whenever you cook something and it turns out grainy, that always means you did something wrong. Hence, almond milk is wrong. Given that it probably requires five billion gallons of California reserve water to make a single pint, it’s wrong both aesthetically and morally.

Flax Milk

Package Copy: "With Good Karma Protein+ FlaxMilk, you also get 5g of high-quality, plant-based protein in every serving." Sounds like what they served on the Snowpiercer train.

Color: Brown. The brown lets you know it’s natural.

Taste: Bitter. Bitter and watery. Bitter and watery are groovy if you’re drinking, I dunno, aged grappa or something. But these are not flavors I want or expect from milk. I also had the poor judgment to buy the unsweetened flax milk, which was doomed to be a horrible mistake. If you’re buying strange milks and they’re not even sweetened, you’re in for a world of pain.

Color: Green. It’s fucking green. REMINDS ME OF WEED, MANNNNNNNN. Especially if you forget to shake it. The top layer of hemp milk looks like some kind of hellish organic version of Mello Yello. I think we need rules about what can legally be called "milk". It shouldn’t just apply to any opaque fluid. This was the least milky of milks.

Taste: Like garbage dumpster runoff. The sweetness only makes it more alarming. In a completely expected but of irony, the brown rice syrup that is used for sweetener in some of these milks—which some concerned mommies prefer to the much-maligned high fructose corn syrup--may contain traces of arsenic. So if you were hoping your magical WEED MILK made for a superior health option, I have a bong hit of reality for you, you slacker.

Quinoa Milk

Package Copy: "Quinoa, an ancient grain prized by the Incas, dates back more than 5,000 years... the super protein for your dairy needs." Always with the Incas, man. The Incas didn’t have an FDA. I don’t know why we’re holding them up as nutritional geniuses.

Color: Puce. Sickly. Looked like hospital barf.

Taste: I got the vanilla flavored quinoa milk, which—surprise!--tasted like terrible milk that someone spiked with vanilla. As the standard punchline grain for jokes about uptight white people, quinoa was destined to be made into a terrible milk, and that milk was destined to taste like shit. I could SEE the watery part of the solution lining the edge of my glass as I was drinking it.

Soy Milk

Package Copy: "Did you know EdenSoy is eco friendly?" Yeah, I probably could have surmised that.

Color: Brown. The brownest. When you see brown liquid, what’s the first thing you think of? Exactly. This isn’t like brown eggs, where the coloring tricks me into thinking the product will have an earthier flavor. This is doodoo brown.

Taste: There’s an old Lewis Black bit about soy milk, and how soy milk is really just soy juice. He was right to be skeptical of soy milk, because it’s brown and thick and has more than a hint of soy sauce flavor to it. They could have made delicious soy sauce with these beans. Instead, they made weird milk to push on you and your children. Soy milk frightens me.

THE TOLERABLE SHIT

Hazelnut Milk

_Package Copy: _"Did you know? Oregon’s been growing hazelnuts since French settlers—who called them filberts—brought them over on the Oregon Trail in the late 1800s. Today the state grows 99% of domestic hazelnuts." I did not know this. Every sip of hazelnut milk is a sip of OREGON HISTORY. We must break the Oregon hazelnut cartel.

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Color: Brown.

_Tastes: _Yep, tastes like hazelnuts. It goes without saying that hazelnuts are better off spending their time hanging out in my jar of Nutella. But as nilks go, this is a fairly tolerable one. You gotta be all right with the brown rice arsenic syrup though. The delicious taste of hazelnuts and arsenic... together at last!

By the way, you can make your own nut milks at home. Bon Appetit says making your own almond milk is "ridiculously easy". The recipe requires 12 hours and a fine mesh sieve. These people do not share my views on what is and what is not "ridiculously easy".

Rice Milk

_Package Copy: "_Our ricemilk is made from whole grain brown rice organically grown right here in the USA and never genetically modified."

Color: White. WHITE! My God, this milk looks like milk.

_Tastes: _Ever had rice pudding? Rice milk tastes like that. No bitterness. No aftertaste of old nut skins and pulped nut meat. Of all the nilks, rice milk is the one that could most likely pass for cow milk in a blind taste test. Must be the arsenic.

Milk Protein Shake

_Package Copy: "_Nutrition To-Go."

Color: White. This one’s made with actual milk, kids.

_Tastes: _Like sugar. There’s a whole new line of protein milks and muscle milks, and they’re all loaded with sugar. They are scams for stupid people with biceps that are too large. I have never understood the idea of workout milk anyway. It’s not like I go running eight miles and think to myself, "Boy! I sure could go for a refreshing bottle of milk right now! MMMMMMMM..." Lactic acid is not your friend when you’re blasting your quads.

Cashew Milk

_Package Copy: "_Once you experience the light, refreshing smoothness of our cashew milk, it won’t be long before it takes over your morning cereal & coffee, midday smoothie, and that great new dairy-free recipe you’ll be compelled to try. Cheers!"

_Tastes: _Thin and watery, pretty much as you’d expect from yet another goddamn nut milk. You’ll notice that the package copy for cashew milk encourages you to use it for everything EXCEPT straight drinking. These are milks that are meant to be hidden, especially in smoothies. Christ, people and their smoothies. I don’t know what it is about health freaks and their stupid Vitamis. Just because you blended it into smithereens doesn’t mean I can’t taste the cashew piss you put in my virgin colada.

_Tastes: _Like coconut milk. Made me wish I was eating a Mounds bar. I can’t drink coconut milk straight without pretending I’m Tom Hanks in Cast Away. "Coconut is a natural laxative." Such an ominous factoid.

Anyway, this is obviously not a milk for drinking or putting in your stupid smoothie. If you’re using coconut milk for anything other than making a fruity cocktail or bitchin’ Thai curry dish, you’re doing coconut milk wrong.

THE WINNER

Oat Milk

_Package Copy: "_Able to grow in harsh climates, the humble oat has been a staple of European diets since medieval times, used in everything from porridge to belly warming drinks."

Color: Yellow. Not promising. No one likes the idea of drinking pus.

_Tastes: _Like liquid oatmeal cookies. And oat milk is naturally sweet, thanks to the HUMBLE magic of King Arthurian oaty goodness! No arsenic syrup required. If I had to pick a phony milk to use for the rest of my life, I guess I’d pick this one. But I don’t need to do that, because cow milk is fine, and because lactose intolerance is for the weak, and because I am not twelve years old.

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